How Dangerous is a STEEL WHIP?

[Music] now entering the facility my 8th grade science teacher mr d like to start off every class with a tricky question for all of us to get our adolescent brains of brewing one day i remember this very clearly he asked the following question what was the first human-made object to break the sound barrier and cause a sonic boom he said it wasn't a fighter jet and it wasn't a bullet and it was kevin stop horsing around back there insubordinate and churlish my point is it's not what you first expect well 8th grade me on that day i raised my hand and i said oh what about the end of a bullwhip isn't that crack something supersonic well this just happened to be the right answer i nailed it and i've i've been trying to chase that high uh every day since then how do you translate some very subsonic hand movements into something supersonic and once we know those physics can we apply them to an ordinary bull whip to make it a little bit more hmm robust and super super dangerous if you've read the title of this video well follow me adventure first following in the footsteps of my beloved science teacher i have a tricky question for you suppose i have a loop of chain i'm holding the end of it in my other hand i'm holding a quarter because i'm stupid rich i hold them both at the exact same height and then drop them at the exact same time under the same local gravitational acceleration i ask you which will hit the ground first the end of that chain or the coin well if you perform this little experiment you will see that the end of the chain actually accelerates faster in free fall than the coin does that's weird and i've seen this effect highlighted in physics papers and the like but never with a name and i'm the one making the video here so i'm going to call this the hill effect really yeah seriously the hill effect is the tendency of the end of a non-rigid continuous object to accelerate faster in free fall than is otherwise dictated by the local gravitational acceleration it just seems a bit egotistical yeah i know i just want to live forever in obscure science textbooks that cost too much money egotistical okay okay the hill effect show it the hill effect is a consequence of the conservation of energy in this universe and it explains how a simple flick of the wrist can be translated into a tremendous sonic snap now as you may know things that move have some energy associated with that movement more specifically energy of the kinetic flavoring defined as one half times the mass of that object times the velocity of that object squared now realistically when we have a whip and you flick it and flick it good that whip is going to lose energy as air resistance and friction takes over during the movement but theoretically any energy that you give a whip in the beginning should be the same amount of energy it has at the end so consider a whip being flipped you now have some portion of mass moving down propagating in a wave type motion down the whip but what's critical to notice here is that the mass of the whip is decreasing along the whip it's tapered so that you have the least mass right at the very end if energy is to be conserved in this example if kinetic energy is to stay the same as mass is going down then velocity has to go up during this process and in fact it does this is what's able to take maybe 10 meters per second of hand movement and take it to 400 meters per second or over 900 miles per hour this of course breaks the sound barrier which is 343 meters per second in normal earth circumstances and this creates the tiny sonic boom at the end of the whip way before a bullet or a fighter jet could even think about doing so this was the answer to mr d's tricky question the tapering of a whip is key and we've all seen what it allows a whip to do with the resulting velocity aside from making guys with ponytails look cool for a few minutes at the ren fair but velocity is just one component of kinetic energy what if we mess around with the mass of a whip by my calculations and according to videos i've seen on the internet if we change the mass of a bullwhip it should be able to make it quite a bit more robust and super duper dangerous i'm not a super villain arya please take us to the surface and contact thea didn't she cut a guy in half once she did yeah she did she is one scare cool she's a very cool lady thea ulrich is a friend and former minion of mine who in addition to being an all-around badass lady is also a fantastic welder i am neither of those things so we are going to her shop today to build a bullwhip made entirely out of steel and then we're gonna try to whip stuff and whip it good with science though the increased mass of the steel in comparison to something like leather should result in something pretty snappy hey kyle i want you to help me build something really ridiculous today you want to know what it is i dread to think but tell me a steel bull whip wow do you think we can pull something like that off um i think we can you know what how do you think we're gonna do that though so if you want to make a bullwhip out of steel i think we have to go with chains we want it to look badass and we need it to function and have a with action at the end so it's going to have to taper down so luckily i actually have a couple of different types and thicknesses of chain here at the shop how did you prepare these chains so what i had to do is i actually bathed these chains in a bath of muriatic acid to strip away the coating on the chains i left the chains in the bath of acid for a while and then i neutralized it with baking soda to make it safe to pull the chains out and get them ready to make our whip now what would happen if you didn't bathe these chains in acid then you started working on them we would breathe a lot of incredibly toxic fumes and get incredibly sick so not so bad then so uh how are you going to attach the different tapering lengths together so here's the plan i'm going to cut through one side of the chain with my plasma cutting torch and also i'm going to be using an angle grinder i'm going to cut through one little length of chain and then i'm going to heat up a part of the chain over here until it's nice and red red to yellow hot i'm going to twist open the chain pull off these links and then slide on a different smaller chain and we're going to go all the way from this incredibly beefy chain which is 5 8 of an inch think down to this super teeny tiny chain which hopefully is thin enough and therefore will whip around fast enough to cut through some well i'll leave it as a surprise so that sounds great what can i do to help um i think it'd be best if you just let me handle this part so when you're changing the form of metal the most important thing is to move quickly because you'll start losing heat as soon as you take the heat away from it so you have to move super fast and pre-set all of the different tools you're going to be using so you can crank that while it's hot now that we've cut one link of the chain i'm going to go and get a smaller chain because we want to start that nice taper and i'm going to hook it on to this length i'm going to reheat up this link close it and then the last trick of the day will be welding this link back it will be just like new [Music] whoa now i'm sure you've probably seen a bull whip cut through paper and extinguish candles and be set on fire but this is something else all together thin and i reckon that this is going to make for a much more exciting demonstration but what should we demonstrate on well as you know my parents were taken from me at a at a young age we were exiting the opera one night and uh in orange came up to my mother and said have you ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlight and then uh so the first thing we're gonna test on is an orange i'm not batman what do you think it's going to do when i hit that orange hopefully make it explode that's what i want to reject there's one way to find out there's one way to find it all right stand back [Music] that is perfect in half cut directly you know what this means more stuff it's go time [Music] that's no joke that is no joke [Music] i think it worked incredibly well i mean look at this look at this straight in half i wouldn't want to be i wouldn't want to be on the wrong end of it no and i should i should stress this bill was kind of dangerous and that thing hit my foot a couple times and you do not want to be on the business end but i'm gonna take that back with me for i do i i think i'm gonna research her research yeah yeah you can have it bye now exiting the facility thank you so much to the very nerdy staff at the facility for their direct and substantial support in the creation of this here video today especially i want to recognize research assistant mike mayer and visiting scholar daniel hawk if you want to get on the staff of the facility if you want to join us today where over a thousand nerds are talking with me 24 7 on discord giving me episode ideas sharing uh videos of their tarantulas molting having their own game nights and radio stations it's a lot of fun you can go to patreon.com kyle hill and join today and if you support the staff just enough in the facility you get your name on our a here each and every week and as you can see there are hundreds and hundreds of you so i have no idea how to pass the to you should follow thea she is so badass and so cool and so talented and she cut a guy in half once what's not to like go to her instagram and her youtube channel which is recently launched and go follow her there i'm i'm ordering you go there and give her the facility bump which i'm not sure if that sounds right thanks for watching

Channel: Kyle Hill

Views: 1,460,841

Rating: 4.8954782 out of 5

Keywords: because science, engineering, kyle hill, learning, math, physics, science, stem, the facility, steel, chain, building, making, invention, bullwhip, sonic boom, diy whip

Id: 8LPLFCkUH-Y

Length: 12min 1sec (721 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 21 2020